Tag: self image

The Wandering Hermit: One Shoulder for the Past & One Shoulder for the Future

   10 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: One Shoulder for the Past & One Shoulder for the Future

I suspect that this is not sustainable, waking up daily and having to choose to not be frustrated by the absolutely frustrating things around me.  For now, I’m managing to reset and refocus each morning, but I imagine I’ll either not be able to do that forever or the frustrating things will have to stop.  I’m not sure which.

I do actually feel amazing today, but part of that is related to my acknowledgment that I don’t actually owe anyone anything.  There are several situations in my life recently in which others are attempting–unintentionally–to obligate me into participation in their lives and in their situations.  I’m trying to find the lines and the balance between caring for the needs of those I love and taking care of my own life.  I spent ten years being the person my parents needed to be.  That was my choice.  I don’t want to complain about that because I value the time I spent with them, but I have a choice in these other situations.  I think it is easy to look at the past decade and assume that since I was able to put myself on pause for Mom & Dad, then I must just be a person who will do that for anyone.  I do want the best for everyone, but I’m starting to realize that they don’t always even consider what the best for me looks like.  

This is all vague, but it is important to my journey of self-actualization that started with my need to buy clothes that would fit my body.  It started with weight; it did not end with weight, and I don’t see myself giving up on finding ways to improve myself and achieve a life that is as fulfilling to me as I deserve.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time packing up things at my parents’ house.  I could see some big issues with my thought processes during packing, but I’m trying to be patient with myself about them.  One is my absolute desire to get back to creating art.  I love it, but the craft room was a room I shared with Mom and it made me sad to go back in there after she died, so I have spent years just wishing I would get back to it.  I packed up a lot of tools I’m looking forward to playing with.  The other was an issue plaguing me lately, and it sometimes causes me a bit of existential dread that I’m not sure how to handle.  I don’t have children.  I’m perfectly okay with that, but I want our family to carry on into the future.  I think my niblings will eventually care about some things, but all of them are so young that they don’t seem invested in their own pasts.  That’s understandable; I certainly wasn’t at their age.  What worries me is how to carry that legacy forward until they are ready.  A lot of people pass down the debris of the lives of their ancestor and my family is no different.  I have some of my great grandma McGuire’s pitcher collection, my second great grandpa Fuchs’ Bible, my grandpa Tucker’s pocket watches, my mom’s diaries.  But the list goes on and on.  My dad was a hoarder, and really the message I internalized was that severing oneself from the items of a loved one is disrespectful.  That thing was important to someone who is important to you, so keep it.  Keep everything.  Keep the photos, keep the quilts, keep the sugar dispenser, keep the wooden spoons, keep the emergency sewing kit, keep the receipts from 1972, keep the unopened mail from 1998.  And I realized when I was packing up everything to put it all in storage yesterday that I don’t want it.  

Now, this is a realization I have been having over and over and over.  Typically it ends in me distracting myself into not thinking about it too deeply.  I have used it to get rid of massive amounts of stuff, but often with especially well-loved things I stop and think those things need to be preserved.  For whom?  That’s the wall I keep coming to.  I love learning about my family.  I might love knowing that my second great grandma Spencer had a book that she loved a great deal, but that does not mean I would want to have her copy with me for the rest of my life.  

People are not the sum of their acquisitions.  I think about the people I’ve lost a lot more in organic ways than I ever do because I saw a ceramic tortoise or a coin purse full of newspaper clippings.  I have no obligation to shoulder the people I will spend my future with, but equally I have no obligation to shoulder the lives of the people I miss from the past.  My Mimi doesn’t exist in her Santas, and I don’t have to find a space for them.

[Walk #85]

The Wandering Hermit: A Skinny Legend & His Twenty Year Old Pants

   8 June 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: A Skinny Legend & His Twenty Year Old Pants

I woke up a little early this morning, but ready to go!  Whereas yesterday morning was full of dread about my walk, today I was itching to get out the door and on my way.  I might have done extra as well, but I do have a small blister on one toe and it started to bother me a little after a couple of miles.  I probably need better shoes.  I don’t get all that many blisters, but I’d love it if I just got none; I had no sooner nursed one of them away when this one popped up.  It’s a very slow game of whack-a-mole on my poor little feet.

A few weeks ago, I found a pair of denim shorts that I used to wear quite a bit while I was living in Alaska.  At a size 46, I could just get them on with a little effort.  They weren’t uncomfortable once on, so I started wearing them all the time and they became increasingly easy to put on.  While making dinner last night, I became fed up and removed those same shorts right there in the middle of the kitchen and tossed them aside.  When it was convenient, I retrieved a pair of sweatpants to replace them.  They have been getting increasingly loose for a while now, and it has become a chore to keep them up, even when I hold them up.  Now, yes, I could get myself a belt, but the point still remains that I went from barely being able to squeeze into shorts from 15 years ago to not having enough girth to hold them up.  And that is progress if you ask me!

The casing that once held so much fat is weird.  It can be squeezed into pants that might otherwise just fit if I hadn’t stretched out the skin.  I had another experience similar to the denim shorts late last night.  In my quest for another pair of shorts, I tried on some from my twenties.  I was a size 38 for many years, so most of my clothes from that time–and yes, I still have a lot of them–are that size.  I was actually able to a pair on and fastened.  They weren’t still comfortable once on, squeezing me just a bit too much, but they fastened and that made me literally jump up and down in a sort of cartoonish moment of glee.  It means a few things.

  1. Apparently, I can do this.  I need a lot of reminders!
  1. As I continue from here, I have plenty of clothes to look forward to.  That said, I wouldn’t call the clothes of my teens & twenties aspirational.  Those were the days when I primarily shopped at County Seat and my edgy clothes came from The Buckle.  I was default settings White.  I sorta still am.
  1. I am a “Skinny Legend.”
  1. I can, and will, take over the world.

Today is probably going to be a stressful day.  I’m trying to fight that back as best I can, but it’s going to be very hot this afternoon and I have to get some things packed and ready to move to storage tomorrow.  That doesn’t even address the lack of space I have in the storage unit, but that isn’t something I have the mental energy to quibble over just now.  Generally, I’m feeling great this morning.  I just know what is coming today and I’m not sure just having the right attitude will help me out.

[Walk #83]

Mindful Musings: In My Green Shirt

There’s a photo I like to share of myself when I was around my heaviest.  It was one I had Justin take of me standing on the front porch in one of the many short-lived “diet” plans I attempted in the time when I wasn’t taking things as seriously.  I stood in the same spot during my meditation, glasses in my pocket, trying to focus on the birds–often, it is the birds that get me out of my own way–but I struggled to not think about how much I feel changed.  And then I realized I am wearing the very clothes I was wearing in that photo.  They hang loosely on me now, but it made me really want a photo recreation today.  I’ll see if Justin will take another.  Maybe I should wait for a year for this kind of thing, but I am impatient.  When I looked it up, I found that the shirt isn’t the same.  They are the same size though, and the pants are almost certainly the same.

The Wandering Hermit: Walks With Mom In The Morning

   19 May 2024  Leave a Comment on The Wandering Hermit: Walks With Mom In The Morning

I had a nice walk this morning; I decided to go East on Burris, which I hadn’t done.  I think I’ve only driven that way once or twice and I live on the corner.  I liked it because of the hills; the only concern I might have walking that way is those two little dogs that live across the street on Fairgrounds.  I’m not concerned about what they might do to me—they are far too small for that—but I don’t really want to distress them unnecessarily.  I’ve been saying I need to go meet them, but I walk so early that I don’t think about it.  I think it might be better if they knew who I was walking by.  In order to walk that direction, I have to walk in their line of sight for a while.  As long as I keep that part of the morning to before 6, I should be okay.  They get let out when the sun comes up.  I have a strong preference for not walking in front of people’s houses if I don’t have to.  I can walk half a mile that direction and only cross one driveway, and that house is set pretty far back.  

It’s been six years without Mom, but honestly I don’t feel like that exactly.  She’s my constant companion, especially on my morning walks.  It’s interesting when we dwell on those we miss.  Mom is my morning companion.  Dad is with me in the late evening.  I know that has a lot to do with my associations with when they were active, but I’m not sure it’s only that either.  Why do my grandparents each have their own full season on the calendar, like some kind of mythology I’ve formed?  We are in the midst of the transition from Mimi to Pap in fact.  Why?  When I think about that, Mom being dawn and Dad being dusk feels pretty natural.

The passing on a calendar of a day doesn’t really cause me any extra stress.  I don’t need to be reminded; I never forgot.  But I have had a stressful week otherwise.  I know that weight loss can cause hormonal issues, so I’m not sure if that is what has been going on, but I have been all over the place mentally.  And I lack the patience I usually have.  Everyone else has managed to make that about themselves, and I cannot help that.  Sometimes I just need space and quiet.  On paper it would seem like I have those things.  In practice, I do not.  I’m not entirely sure how to set proper boundaries anymore.

[Walk #59]